Your e-commerce platform will probably be one of the most critical pieces of software you select for your business. In recent months, we’ve observed that a lot of companies end up switching platforms. This is extremely painful and costly - you have to divert your team's energy away from running your business to switching. We’ve boiled it down to the five key questions you need to ask yourself to help you avoid this expense and choose the right platform for you:

1. How big do I expect my business to be?

If you think that you’re starting a really big business, this might be the only time it’s worthwhile to invest in a custom or highly customizable platform, like Spree. If you’re a large brand, you’ll inevitably want to fully control the customer experience and come up with innovative offerings for your customer base. This will be hard to achieve without investing tech resources. On the other hand, if you think your brand might stay relatively small, you can probably get away with using a basic, user friendly tool like Shopify or BigCommerce. They don’t enable a lot of customization, but you can create a really beautiful e-commerce site in a short time. That being said, ShopifyPlus does cater towards larger brands.

2. How unique is my business model?

If you’re selling a product a la carte to an end consumer without a ton of complexity, a simple platform like Shopify could serve you really well. However, if you’re starting a business with a rent-to-own model or a subscription model, you’ll definitely want something more customizable like Spree or Magento. Both platforms are open source, so you can hire a development team to help you craft the nuances you need. We always encourage new businesses to keep it simple and avoid inserting needless complexity into their model. To start, keep your SKU count low and your model straightforward.

3. How tech savvy am I?

You have to be really honest with yourself. Can you actually build a website? It’s OK if you can’t, but if that’s the case, even with a do-it-yourself platform like Shopify, you’ll probably need some tech support. If you’re pretty tech savvy; however, you can get yourself up and running quickly. If you’re not tech savvy and wind up choosing a more customized platform that requires heavy development investment, you might really struggle to supervise a dev team without someone technical on your team.

4. How quickly do I need to be up and running?

In some cases, time may be the biggest constraint. If it’s extremely urgent for you to start your business, then you definitely want a platform like Shopify or BigCommerce that requires relatively few development resources and can get you to market quickly. On the other hand, if you have time to diligence, onboard a dev team and spec out the product, then spending the time to create something that really represents your brand and is unique to your business might be worthwhile.

5. Do I have capital to invest in tech resources?

Shopify and BigCommerce will be more cost effective than any tools that require development like Magento, Spree or a custom platform. That being said, what companies don’t often anticipate is that once you’ve built out your website, the investment has just begun. Anytime you want to make a change, you’ll need to spend capital on your development team. Further, as you build out your business and incorporate additional tools and systems like an accounting system, an ERP system or an inventory management system like Fuse, you’ll find that with customized platforms, you'll need at least some dev resources for these integrations. The more customization you’ve done, the more development work will be required on your side to make the platform work. These costs are often unanticipated. Shopify is at an advantage on this dimension because it has the most robust app marketplace with tons of vendors to choose from

To help you make this critical decision or to help you switch if you need to, we’ve created a pro and con cheat sheet:

Pros

Cons

Easy to use

Increasingly nicer and nicer templates

Robust 3rd party marketplace

Possibility of Shopify Plus upgrade

Cheap

Core product does not support multiple currencies

Not very customizable

Open source

Highly customizable

Solid 3rd party marketplace

Somewhat old school

Requires a lot of development resources

Open source

Highly customizable

Commonly used by e-commerce start-ups

Great for subscriptions

No 3rd party marketplace

Requires a lot of customization and development resources

Integrates e-commerce store with 3PL

Omnichannel focus with some inventory management capabilities

3PL is not very good

Does require custom dev work

Easy to use

Slightly slower load times vs. Shopify

Great how to content

Cheap

Small third party ecosystem relative to Shopify

Generally lower quality design than Shopify and BigCommerce

Customization can be costly and require dev work

Easy to use

Wordpress plugin

Free

No matter which platform you end up choosing (or switching to), Fuse is here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.